Developing a Plex metadata exporter Emby importer tool for movies

[Sludge Vohaul 22]

Hi,

 

some time ago I started the work on a tool for exporting movie metadata from a Plex library and importing this metadata to Emby.

 

I am slowly heading towards feature completeness for my (simple) needs, but maybe such tool is handy for others, too.

 

Currently imported metadata:

* All collections (boxsets) the Plex-movie is part of are created in Emby (and the movie is put into)

* Plex Poster- and Background-images (imported as Primary- and Backdrop-images)

* Title

* Sort Title

* Watched/Unwached (incl. PlayCount and LastPlayedDate)

 

What other metadata might be of interest?

 

As it's still under active development there are no release binaries available. The tool sources are here, some notes on the tool are in the Wiki.

 

 

[Luke 37008]

Well done !

[Taulkas 0]

What other metadata might be of interest?

 

My biggest issue is getting the metadata for about 25K of personal media (not movie or TV) data exported out of plex. Currently trying to get kodi with kodiplexconnect to export nfos, but that doesn't seem to be working. It took years to create all that, so I'd rather not have to do that again.

[marcelhehle 1]

What other metadata might be of interest?

 

• Tagline and description of a movie
• Cast and director
• tmdb/ttvdb/(data18) reference

 

I'm including cast and director here because of a specific need I have: exporting/importing my adult content. In Plex I had the data18 plugin that's not available in Emby. So my idea is that I could continue to use Plex for adult content and because I have Emby and Plex running on the same box and accessing the same files,  with the right tool I could import that metadata into Emby.

[Sludge Vohaul 22]

@@Taulkas

 

#3: Hm, what metadata exactly would you like to be exported?

[Sludge Vohaul 22]

@@marcelhehle

 

#4: Regarding the first two points this information is (usually) pulled from some web-movie-info-database. I suppose you have added this metadata to your library items manually as it is not present in any of the online databases?

Anyway, the more I think about importing taglines and other "pullable" stuff, the more I come to the conclusion that the tool should be configurable (in a user friendly manner) in terms of what metadata it should import. I have not found a satisfying solution yet... Do not expect to find a fancy UI anytime soon

I've added these two items in the tool's wiki so that it does not get forgotten.

 

Regarding your third point (and the Kodi* thing), sorry, but I don't even know what it is - I am just a guy who got pissed off of Plex because Plex for ATV requires a PlexAccount. I do not really care about movies, actors, latest and greatest stuff, I just want to stream the movies I have inside my intranet without Plex now.

So please, either point me to the data in the XML file the Plex API generates, or provide screenshots or similar

Edited October 21, 2017 by Sludge Vohaul

[Taulkas 0]

@@Taulkas

 

#3: Hm, what metadata exactly would you like to be exported?

 

I'd like to have pretty much everything user editable in the web client... This is all metadata that was added manually over years as Plex, nor Emby, are capable of finding it.

 

As much as possible I have the following UI fields populated:

 

General:

  Title

  Sort Title

  Original Title

  Originally Available

  Rating

  Content Rating

  Tagline

  Summary

Tags:

  Directors

  Genres

  Writers

  Collections

 

There also used to be a year field, but Plex removed that from the UI awhile back; and has ever since been repeatably breaking properly populating it.

 

As for using Kodi to do this, there is this: http://kodi.wiki/view/Import-export_library which I have been trying to do with the PlexKodiConnect plug-in installed, without much success to date. Probably either didn't setup PKC in Kodi properly and/or a paths/permissions issue. Getting this metadata copied over is the only reason my Plex server is still running.

[marcelhehle 1]

@@marcelhehle

 

#4: Regarding the first two points this information is (usually) pulled from some web-movie-info-database. I suppose you have added this metadata to your library items manually as it is not present in any of the online databases?

 

Maybe I can explain ...

 

Have a look at Emby's Developer Policy: https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Emby/wiki/Development-Policy

 

 

The following are some examples of practices that we know would violate this policy.

• Scraping data from a site such as IMDb.com. This data is considered a valuable asset to IMDb and they charge handsomely for it. It is against the law to obtain and re-distribute it without their consent.

 

So ... as TheTVDB and TheMovieDB are offering APIs we get metadata from there. All fine. But for adult content on Plex I used the Data18 plugin, that is scraping the data18 webpage. As to Embys developer policy that's not allowed on Emby.  Also because of this policy currently there is no plugin available that can pull adult content. Ok, TheMovieDB offers a bit, but their coverage is very small.

 

But because I still have all that metadata in Plex (scraped by Plex's data18 plugin), importing it from there into Emby wouldn't violate the developer policy.

 

That's the reason I was asking for pullable content to be included in the import.

[levander 96]

Hi, I've been Plex user for years and I am seriously considering to leave it and go with Emby but I invested many many hours in building collections and I am looking for solutions... Have you succeeded to export data you wanted ? I would really like to know if this still work/at last works mainly regarding collections? If yes I would also like to know how to use your tools. I just downloaded it from here https://github.com/SludgeVohaul/P2EApp but have no idea what to do with it.

 

Thanks in advance.

[Luke 37008]

You could also use trakt.

[levander 96]

You could also use trakt.

 

Trakt for export - import of metadata??

 

Actually the only thing I care about are collections. Can't figure out the way to export them - where, how and to what - to be able to import them to emby...

[Luke 37008]

No not metadata, only watch data.

 

For metadata, nfo is your best cross-app option.

[Dbinott 0]

So is this tool now dead? Is it still needed if we need to do this? Maybe I will download it and see if I can update it, if it needs it.

[Happy2Play 8242]

Maybe I can explain ...

 

Have a look at Emby's Developer Policy: https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Emby/wiki/Development-Policy

 

 

So ... as TheTVDB and TheMovieDB are offering APIs we get metadata from there. All fine. But for adult content on Plex I used the Data18 plugin, that is scraping the data18 webpage. As to Embys developer policy that's not allowed on Emby.  Also because of this policy currently there is no plugin available that can pull adult content. Ok, TheMovieDB offers a bit, but their coverage is very small.

 

But because I still have all that metadata in Plex (scraped by Plex's data18 plugin), importing it from there into Emby wouldn't violate the developer policy.

 

That's the reason I was asking for pullable content to be included in the import.

 

So what is stopping someone from making and using a personal plugin? 

 

 

or plug-ins presented in our plug-in catalog.

 

One that never goes in the Catalog,